Towards an Open Banking API Standard - <AUTHOR> http://jackgavigan.com/2016/02/10/towards-an-open-banking-api-standard/ <comment><USER2> Total transparency, I'm one of the co-founders of Plaid[1]. Plaid's at the center of this in the US so we've been following this standard closely. It's exciting to see Europe and the UK taking this step forward - I'm hopeful that there will be some exciting news coming from the US pretty soon. More transparency and accessibility in this space is crucial - at the end of the day it has to be about enabling developers to build new products and enabling consumers to have real choice, while at the same time preserving (sometime arduous) compliance and security needs. If anyone ever wants to nerd out about banking standards or get involved feel free to shoot me an email at william[at]plaid.com.

[1] [https://www.plaid.com](https://www.plaid.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> If there _is_ something happening in the US, it would be great if the UK and US efforts could align.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When are US banks going to come around to open banking? They need to come around to the model where they provide the infrastructure and let third parties manage the customer interaction.

RobinHood's model[1] is pretty interesting in this respect. They are managing the highly regulated part of stock trading and letting API clients deal with the customer experience. This enable trading to be done from any number of apps that consumers are using without those app developers from having to deal with the regulated investment management component.

This is the model that banks should adopt. Unfortunately, it will take incumbent a long time to come around to this.

I've written about opening up bank data here: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-my-financial-data-free- jo...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-my-financial-data-free-johnie-lee)

[1] [http://www.financemagnates.com/fintech/investing/robinhood-g...](http://www.financemagnates.com/fintech/investing/robinhood- goes-open-with-openfolio-quantopian-stocktwits-and-rubicoin-integration/)

<comment><USER4> > When are US banks going to come around to open banking? They need to come > around to the model where they provide the infrastructure and let third > parties manage the customer interaction.

When they have an incentive to. No one is going to change their business unless financially incentivized to do so.

To your other point, you can use Bancorp bank if you want to build a tech platform on top of a real bank. That's how BankSimple (now just Simple.com) built their platform.

<comment><USER5> _" Let third parties manage the customer interaction."_

Bad idea. Dealing directly with a regulated bank, you know who to blame and have more legal protections. With some third-party intermediary, who pays for fraud? App developers will try to wiggle out of taking any responsibility. PayPal and WePay, for example, have routinely done that.

Read "simple.com"'s user contract.[1]

[1] [https://www.simple.com/policies/bancorp-account- agreement](https://www.simple.com/policies/bancorp-account-agreement)

<comment><USER4> +1.

APIs have created this false confidence that every action is an API call away, until you run up against real-life, necessary regulations (financial, life safety, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're in the UK and want a banking API, I'm building [http://teller.io/](http://teller.io/). It's been in private beta about 2.5 months and access will be opening more broadly soon. I couldn't wait for banks to get themselves into gear so I reverse engineered all of their mobile apps, took their private APIs and expose a single unified API through Teller.

So far the RBS banks, e.g. Natwest are in prod. If you bank with them, want super early access, understand it's beta product and will give some feedback: sg <> @ <> teller.io

<comment><USER7> There is no way I'd trust my users' security with you when you can't even be bothered to use SSL.

<comment><USER6> The landing page is a GitHub page. The app itself is [https://developer.teller.io/](https://developer.teller.io/) and we don't even listen on port 80 on the API host. Happy to answer any questions you have, security related or otherwise.

<comment><USER8> you might be better off using [http://netlify.com](http://netlify.com) since they support ssl for static sites

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the tip. The current static site is being taken out of service soon and the app being moved to the main domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I so wish this was true, banks are the dinosaurs of IT. I understand they have security in mind, but it's not possible that in 2016 I still have to go to a branch of my UK bank to get some things done. An open API would allow 3rd parties to revolutionize the UX.

<comment><USER10> Consider switching banks. It's really easy with the "current account switching service" (they close the old account, redirect any payments to the new one for 13 months, and switch over all direct debit and standing orders).

That that service exists shows they're not quite the dinosaurs you imagine.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately I am abroad very often, so it's difficult to find the time to switch banks. Also, I checked the mobile apps of other banks and they are even worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For Germany there is HBCI (now FinTS), which is relatively old. Its not really web oriented, but rather used by banking Software like Quicken.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS)

<comment><AUTHOR> The interesting thing about the availability of HBCI/FinTS in Germany is that it seems to have fostered a fintech sector there, first with PFM apps and now with the Open Bank Project and startup banks like Fidor, Avuba and Number26.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if it's government regulation that's driven British banks to be innovators.

"Faster payments" (electronic payments that clear within 2 hours, usually minutes) were requested by the government. [1].

The Current Accounts Switching Service [2] makes it much easier (zero effort for the customer) to transfer a current account to a different bank, which the government also required.

In fact, that's led me to "7 ways banking has been made easier", [3], from the government.

So, some open data standards seem the natural progression from this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service#Backgr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service#Background)

[2] [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/bank-account-switching- se...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/bank-account-switching-service-set- to-launch)

[3] [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/7-ways-banking-has- been-m...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/7-ways-banking-has-been-made- easier)

Edit to add: The first paragraph of the executive summary of the report is "In the 2015 Budget HM Treasury announced its commitment to delivering an open standard for Application Programming Interfaces in UK banking, to help customers have more control over their data and to make it easier for financial technology companies (FinTechs) or other businesses to make use of bank data on behalf of customers in a variety of helpful and innovative ways."

</comment><comment><USER12> Transparency Begets Trust; However banks make lots of money with privacy/secrecy;

</comment><comment><USER13> Hopefully the result isn't as horribly complex as the FIX protocol...

</comment><comment><USER14> How about ISO 20022?</comment>


What is the "minimal" set of primitives needed for a Lisp interpreter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.faqs.org/faqs/lisp-faq/part1/section-6.html <comment><USER2> I can't stop myself from reading it like free verse because of the line breaks :|

<comment><USER3>
        Does that mean you read comments in source like
        free verse? Certainly, effortlessly reading text
        with hard line breaks is a skill a hacker should
        have or develop.</comment></comment>


Contacts Between Police and the Public, 2015 (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> More from the Bureau of Justice Statistics: [https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=70#pubs](https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=70#pubs)

1-page summary of this PDF: [https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15_sum.pdf](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15_sum.pdf)</comment>


Machine Learning for a Better Developer Experience - <AUTHOR> https://netflixtechblog.com/machine-learning-for-a-better-developer-experience-1e600c69f36c <comment><USER2> _" Imagine having to go through 2.5GB of log entries from a failed software build — 3 million lines — to search for a bug or a regression that happened on line 1M."_

If your build log files approach gigabytes in size, what you're going to need to do is _not_ search for that bug. You're going to need to rethink your career and life choices. You're going to need to take a vacation, do some traveling, get some perspective. Figure out where it all went wrong and what to make of the years that remain. Life is short.

<comment><USER3> Or just use grep? Are there people building systems that keep logs that are not easily grepable? I've never seen one, and I have seen some very poorly designed systems. I do work outside of traditional environments though (embedded, robotics, avionics).

<comment><USER4> >Are there people building systems that keep logs that are not easily grepable?

Yeah, I've seen ELK stacks, Splunk, or even RDBMS tables for log entries

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would really be interesting to learn more about their domain. Builds logs you have control over and should be able to keep clean and actionable. Service or batch job logs could present a more difficult problem though. It would be useful to try and spot a key message halfway through a failed 20 minute process that is the reason you hit an error at the end. Again though using logging levels and grep should usually be enough. You can also flag excessively noisy code and improve the signal to noise of the output it produces.

In specific with a build system like Bazel you might execute 1,000,000 actions on a build producing lots of _internal_ output but you only see the errors, and at most you have a few hundred lines to look through. That is managed in a few key ways:

\- Test output is completely hidden unless that specific test fails

\- Build actions only produce output when they have an error, and it's easy to keep it that way (because they stand out, and can be quickly fixed)

\- Bazel does not tell you about _every_ action that is run only ones that fail or take or a long time

<comment><USER6> I don't think they are talking about build logs. They are talking about the logs of a version of their app. One indication is they gave an example of identifying login errors.

<comment><USER7> "Log entries from a failed software build" made me think they were talking about build logs initially.

Was scratching my head at the idea of a build system spitting out 3 million log lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> hey folks, I am one of the authors of the article. Seeing an interesting conversation here. Wanted to clarify a few points: Our logs in general, and build logs produced by Jenkins in particular are all over the place. The usual suspects like Java build logs can be grepped or tailed, but the complicated use cases, that actually do produce anything from 10-20 megabyte to gigabytes of output in console leave very little room to investigate - and we do have lots and lots of these. I am happy to answer any questions here.

</comment><comment><USER9> Friendly reminder: if you can grep, then grep. If you can tail, then tail. If you can diff, then diff. This is an idea to try for all the cases left over.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not sure I understand the problem they are solving, aren't errors in logs something than can just be grepped for?

(Also: really cool illustrations. Very unexpected in a tech blog.)

<comment><USER11> The way I understand this. They are doing "fuzzing diffing", I would say even semantic diff that can "understand" that "log in error, check log" and "problem authenticating" are the same (close). They apply it to compare (GB scale) files with application or build logs to identify anomalies efficiently. Otherwise if you just run `diff file1 file2` it would produce enormous result in the real life app. At least in their case.

Machine learning is used in the "understands" part above ^^.</comment></comment>


Randomly Generated N64 Games [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-vusWL2cx4 <comment><USER2> This is about the use of procedural generation in commercial N64 games like F-Zero X, not (as I was thinking) something like "Programming with a Differentiable Forth Interpreter" \+ N64.

Disclaimer: I stopped watching after the first third, when the video didn't go into technical detail about the procedural generation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I watched it, but it wasn't terribly interesting. It's nothing but list of four games, delivered with a lot of enthusiasm about the mere existence of some amount of procedurally generated content.

The video-maker also seems to have little idea about how procedurally generated game content is actually implemented. The video is purely from a retro game enthusiast perspective.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your domain registrar of choice? - <AUTHOR> Just curious what registrars you recommend (&/or those you recommend against) using and why? <comment><USER2> For a business, MarkMonitor. They provide brand protection, super-locking domains (if another registrar tries to change root server records, they will change it back and contact that other registrar) and many other things. If someone managed to get one of your domains, their team can give your lawyers everything they need to quickly get it back. They have real customer support managers and respond quickly to support requests. You can get a real person on the phone instantly. Their CSM's can assist with migrating domains from all other registrars and know all the issues with each. Some countries have unique and odd restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER3> To be frugal I check registration prices using tld-list[0] before purchasing a new domain.

Generally, though, I stick with Porkbun[1]. Their prices are decent and I prefer their site over Namecheap, 101domain, and a few others that I've used.

[0]: [https://tld-list.com/](https://tld-list.com/)

[1]: [https://porkbun.com/](https://porkbun.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> 1&1[0]. The UI is super and focused on your productivity and not on selling you things when you're trying to edit your domain settings. I've used them exclusively for 20 years. Also, they have great prices and intro offers if you are buying a name for a new project.

[0][http://1and1.com](http://1and1.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> Namecheap is the least worst in my experience</comment>


Google Says It's Not the Driverless Car's Fault. It's Other Drivers' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/technology/personaltech/google-says-its-not-the-driverless-cars-fault-its-other-drivers.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> '"It's always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like 'Why is the car doing that?'" said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google's Silicon Valley headquarters.'

This is a drum that, like privacy and encryption, we techies need to start banging hard before it's too late. The fact that laws are _fundamentally_ limited by our abilities to enforce them, and that laws are _fundamentally_ written to be enforced by humans with some discretion, is such a deep assumption for us that we don't see it. We irrationally tend to conceive of a law that says "It is a felony to wear your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday" as an absolute, even though what it really means is "If a police officer spots you with your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday, and by their discretion arrests you, and at the discretion of a prosecutor charges you, who at the discretion of a judge and jury convicts you, you will be guilty of a felony." _All_ laws actually say that, but that's not how we humans speak or conceptualize them. Also note the importance of a human even spotting the violation in the first place.

So, naturally, when we get technology that can rigidly enforce law, we don't program them with the "real" law, we program them with the _text_ of the law. But the truth is, _the text was never passed as a law_. When the law was deliberated, everybody was _really_ deliberating the version that involves all the human discretion, and prior to the introduction of computers, the law that was really enforced was the one with all the human discretion. A rigidly- enforced-by-computer law is a _fundamentally different law_ , in the most concrete way possible; actions that you would never have been penalized by the human law result in immediate penalty in the computer world. There's no more concrete way to prove the point that it is a fundamentally different law.

We CAN NOT simply translate the text of the law into computer programs. If we are going to do computer enforcement of laws (and I'm going to drop the question of whether that's a good idea, feel free to debate in replies), we _must_ write new law. By that, I do not merely mean that society has an obligation to write new laws, but that the very act of programming a law _is_ writing a new law into existence, one never deliberated by the processes of democracy. We _literally_ can not simply translate laws into programs. It is impossible. The result is not the same law.

<comment><USER3> I'm playing the devil's advocate here but another alternative would be to write laws that are meant to be literal and enforced 100% of the time.

<comment><USER4> That's basically a form of authoritarianism.

Also, this is essentially the underlying premise behind no-tolerance policies and three-strike drug laws with mandatory sentences, which view interpreting the law based on context as an impediment to enforcement, the solution for which is removing the ability of judges to do so. You can't have a just legal framework in which the only role of humans is to be punished or to exact punishment.

<comment><USER5> Your conclusions don't necessarily follow. Your interpretation of that post is exactly the kind of problem being addressed here; your idea of how laws currently work is preventing you from seeing how to change them.

Basically, what you have to do is codify human discretion. If a judge wants to say "no, this really isn't a problem," he should be able to directly add that exception to the written law, and then enforce it as written. It's basically a kind of open source law. The question becomes of how to distribute authority.

<comment><USER4> > he should be able to directly add that exception to the written law, and > then enforce it as written. It's basically a kind of open source law. The > question becomes of how to distribute authority.

So basically, more or less what happens now, only with more bureaucracy and complexity? I'm sorry, but I don't see the benefit in that case.

<comment><USER5> The benefit is that you can better automate it.

But if that line of reasoning were good enough, then the US made a mistake by rejecting the rule of a monarch. Democracy is rife with managerial issues.

<comment><USER4> The typical premise behind automation is to remove the (ethical and financial) burden of a human workforce while keeping the benefits provided by human labor. For most business processes this is acceptable (inevitable loss of jobs notwithstanding.)

But when your 'product' is violence on behalf of the state (in the anarcho- libertarian sense of 'violence' being any non-voluntary interaction with a person or power structure, sometimes involving actual violence) then the ability of humans to mediate, alter and affect that system becomes a feature as well as a bug. This necessarily limits the speed of the law and the degree to which it can be optimized, and remain humane, because removing humans from that system tends to merely concentrate power in the hands of the few humans necessary for it to function.

And then the questions become if humans can write the laws, and humans can update the laws, and humans are enforcing the laws, and have discretion in doing so, then what really is being automated, or optimized, other than recordkeeping? And for that matter, what does law as a programming language actually _improve_?

<comment><USER5> >then what really is being automated, or optimized, other than recordkeeping?

 _Other_ than record keeping? Why does it need to go beyond that? You don't want transparency in your laws? You don't want the ability to format and translate them as needed? You don't want the ability to do queries and comparisons? You don't want machines to be able to update their own behavior when the law changes?

I'm not talking about automating anything other than record keeping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases.

I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

<comment><USER7> I can appreciate the claim that driving is an art, full of edge cases. But that claim on its own conceals the reality that _humans_ are extremely bad at it. A ludicrous number of people die in automobile accidents. While it may be a long while before self-driving cars can match the prowess of an excellent driver, much less a professional one, I doubt we're far off from being able to exceed the ability of the _average_ driver.

<comment><USER8> Define ludicrously bad. Yes there are a lot of accidents and fatalities every year. However the rate of fatalities in the U.S. Is 1 per 100 million miles driven which isn't intuitively a ridiculously high rate.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that fatalities per miles driven is that useful of a statistic, except for the other conversation of how to enable people to drive fewer miles (which I certainly approve of). It's still just abysmal that 30,000 people each year die doing something extremely routine that is virtually required to live in most areas. That's something like a quarter of US deaths from accidents/injuries. And, of course, there are presumably far more injuries than there are deaths, plus property damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the accident statistics are a little misleading because as far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) Google only operates its driverless cars in good weather conditions.

Not that Google doesn't have good reasons for doing so, but the safety of these vehicles might look different if they were operated in the rain and snow.

<comment><USER10> They also only work in areas where Google already has "very detailed maps of the roads and terrain", kind of like invisible train tracks. ( [http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial- intel...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial- intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works) )

<comment><USER11> Bear in mind that the phrase you quoted is from a third party, not someone who actually works on the project. And it's from four years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Heh, google is training cars to drive like grandmas.

> _But the technology, like Google's car, drives by the book. It leaves what > is considered the safe distance between itself and the car ahead. This also > happens to be enough space for a car in an adjoining lane to squeeze into, > and, Mr. Windsor said, they often tried._

Yeah. We just don't have the infrastructure in major cities for all of us to drive safely. We've been slowly crowding our roads over the last century and we're at the point where most people are used to driving with a 1 or 2 second rule. Which isn't good, but it's how we do things.

Now I wonder if google-driven cars would actually be less efficient for LA. Sure there wouldn't be any traffic-slowing accidents, but there'd be 50% less volume traveling 20mph slower.

<comment><USER13> I'm not convinced that leaving shorter gaps between cars increases volume. Instead it creates waves of drivers slamming on the brakes because they are unable to react gradually, creating congestion instead.

If we all left bigger gaps, we'd all be able to drive faster, increasing throughput (on highways, at least).

> Now I wonder if google-driven cars would actually be less efficient for LA. > Sure there wouldn't be any traffic-slowing accidents, but there'd be 50% > less volume traveling 20mph slower.

Self-driving cars in a line could detect and link up with each other, sharing sensor data on obstacles up ahead. In the end, this has the potential to safely reduce the gaps between cars at higher speeds and thus actually increase throughput, since the congestion issues with human drivers reacting separately would not apply.

<comment><USER14> > Self-driving cars in a line could detect and link up with each other, > sharing sensor data on obstacles up ahead. In the end, this has the > potential to safely reduce the gaps between cars at higher speeds and thus > actually increase throughput, since the congestion issues with human drivers > reacting separately would not apply.

Isn't this already true to a certain extent with map software? It automatically directs you to the fastest route—congestion relief is, in a way, built-in to open infrastructure.

It seems to be the topology of the highway system would have a much larger impact on congestion than the drivers themselves. Among other things, it's going to be a long time (hopefully never. IMHO) before human drivers are off the road.

<comment><USER15> In my experience, including such prestigiously congested roadways as the 405, 101 and the 10, it has a lot to do with behavior (ie. the 'caterpillar' effect) than route.

Rather, it's not physical space, but delays in processing speed adjustments. Distracted drivers accelerate and brake late, causing complete stops and quick acceleration to catch up.

<comment><USER14> Well, I can't speak for LA, but you have to acknowledge the role of having all those drivers on the road in the first place. Distributed better, jitter in driver behavior should tend towards having no effect with the distance between cars.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, you're right, physical density does have a role.

There's a sort of critical mass that happens; traffic flows well even though everyone is being dumb vs. traffic stopping when everyone is being dumb...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Being a cyclist in Amsterdam, the lack of driver eye contact and understanding of body language is what worries me about the application of self driving cars.

Amsterdam traffic is a chaos in which pedestrians and cyclists mix with cars, and the former two frequently (some would say always) ignore the rules. Not out of some anarchistic impulse, but for mutual convenience. Especially with cyclists, for whom coming to a full stop and accelerating again is both "expensive" and risky (accelerating cyclists tend to swerve), relying on eye contact and mutual understanding of intent rather than following the rules of the road by the book results in safer and more fluent traffic.

I imagine a current generation Google self-driving car in Amsterdam coming to a grinding halt and not being able to move backwards or forwards.

But most of all, as a cyclist I wouldn't feel safe sharing the road with "drivers" with whom communicating via eye contact and body language are impossible.

To me, self-driving cars and liveable, human-scale cities are mutually exclusive, and I very much prefer the latter.

<comment><USER17> Until you actually live surrounded by self-driving cars, your speculation is nothing more than that.

As someone who also commutes by bicycle, I would vastly prefer predictable, 100% consistent car behavior.

<comment><USER18> I wonder if a few e-ink displays on the outside of the cars could be used to smooth out these interactions by conveying actions and intents in plain English. I would be comforting to see 'Stopped, waiting for bicyclist to pass' flash up on the front display when I bike up to a 4-way stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it would be great if at some point some lanes of the freeways are dedicated for autonomous vehicles connected to a city or state-controlled system with some fallback. I suspect there is a fallacy somewhere in my idea, but I think the first step is to make some lanes only for autonomous vehicles on the freeway, and eventually all lanes as autonomous vehicles become more commonplace.

I'm not a civil engineer, but I suspect this could eliminate a lot of traffic if all the cars are placed in the most optimal lane, assuming all vehicles on highways are autonomous.

</comment><comment><USER20> What happens with these driverless cars at four way stop signs? With humans, generally someone waves to the other driver signaling either to take right of way or that they will go first.

I presume the car doesn't understand hand gestures, so does it just start nudging into the intersection and stop if another car goes ahead?

<comment><USER21> Actually, it can already understand some hand gestures [1]. Compared to all the other things an autonomous car has to deal with, gesture recognition doesn't seem like such a stretch.

[1] [http://road.cc/content/news/150448-google-patent-reveals- how...](http://road.cc/content/news/150448-google-patent-reveals-how- driverless-cars-recognise-hand-signals)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Driving can easily end up as a competitive game where safety is traded against efficiency. The big versions of this are terrible, assholes weaving in and out of lanes at +20 mph. But it happens in little ways too, the rolling stops at 4-ways from the article are probably a tiny example.

Someone should host a programming competition where every entrant writes the AI for a fleet of simulated driverless cars, each with random starting and ending destinations. Collisions mean you instantly lose. Your score is based on how quickly you can get through traffic generated by all the other AIs.

I think the results would tell us a lot about where things are heading, or maybe where they should or shouldn't be allowed to go.

(Of course, if you could control the whole fleet, all the cars could just ignore all the rules and dodge each other while tearing through intersections.)

</comment><comment><USER23> Step 1. Release autonomous cars to market with lower incidence rate than humans.

Step 2. Sit back and watch humans cause accidents; insurance for human drivers goes thru the roof.

Step 3. ???

Step 4. Skynet.

<comment><USER24> Serious question.

Is computer vision so advanced that it is already so obvious that self-driving cars will definitely be safer?

Yes it's a computer which is more reliable at always outputting the same answer than a human but it's not a simple application this one.

As far as I know most robots get confused at times just as humans do.

I think eventually they will be, because they can learn and share their knowledge and keep learning about all the real world exceptions without limitation unlike humans.

But right now or when they are deployed en mass. I'm not sure they will DEFINITELY without exception be safer.

And I know there exists statistics about accident rates per kilometre driven but aren't those only a few cars driving previously selected and well documented routes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > "The real problem is that the car is too safe..."

no. this statement is fallacious, and i believe it is dangerously misleading. it sounds like something out of the mouth of a corporate attorney, and not someone who cares about being _actually_ safe. out here in the real world driving laws are more like guidelines.

my take on the situation is the car knows and follows all of the written rules of the road, but not the unwritten ones. kind of like a 16-year-old kid who's just aced his driving exam, but doesn't yet have a feel for driving. every so often he encounters a situation not covered by the law or the driver's handbook, and he's forced to choose the safest course of action on his own.

i live near google in mountain view, and (usually) encounter the self-driving SUVs many times a day, either biking around town or as they drive past my residence. in hundreds of encounters i've only witnessed one potentially dangerous incident (many months ago) involving a self-driving SUV. it wasn't clear to me who/what was at fault.

whilst making a protected left turn onto west el camino real from el monte ave [0], a self-driving SUV came to a complete stop in the middle of the intersection, causing the vehicles behind it to halt and lay on their horns. since the incident occurred a few yards behind me (over my left shoulder) i don't know exactly what precipitated the incident, but reflecting on the experience has caused me to recognize some potential flaws in this generation of self-driving vehicles.

that intersection's turning lanes are delineated by dotted lines. this isn't unique, but it's interesting to me because dotted lines can sometimes be more difficult to see than solid lines (especially in certain lighting or weather conditions, or when there are debris on the road). for example, i remember lanes on stretches of 101-N marked with faded dotted lines and no reflector dots. these lanes were impossible to see under wet conditions and the sun's reflection. drivers were forced to either guess where the lanes might be, or to follow other vehicles, but we could still proceed safely. how would a driverless vehicle respond?

further, some human drivers completely ignore lane markers even when they are perfectly visible. in india and some central american countries, for example, driving conditions are like the polar opposite of suburban SV: lawless. yet in my experience, driving there is not without rules; it's just that the rules are unwritten. and though this is an extreme analogy, it led me to an interesting question: if self-driving vehicles can't safely navigate the crowded streets of mumbai, how comfortable are we giving them free reign in the US? or perhaps should we exclude them from certain roads until they can?

the main point i'm trying to make is this: the current generation of self- driving vehicles has not developed (whether by feature or flaw) the level of intuition of an experienced and safe driver. they are quite literally like student drivers whose instructors have a foot above the brake and a hand on the steering wheel. and while it's conceptually possible to create safer roads by eliminating human error, i'm not confident replacing humans with a bunch of robotic student drivers is the best solution. i'd feel much safer as a passenger in a vehicle driven by someone or something that's A) primarily concerned with my safety (and not corporate liability), and B) knows what to do in unexpected or unpredictable circumstances.

[0] satellite image of the intersection; pin at approximate incident site: [https://www.google.com/maps/place/1786+El+Camino+Real,+Mount...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/1786+El+Camino+Real,+Mountain+View,+email@example.com,-122.095255,191m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x808fb0c7fbe6c66b:0x260bc9681a0e197)

</comment><comment><USER26> And here come the technocrats ready to say "let's ban driving and make driverless cars mandatory"...

</comment><comment><USER27> Two driverless cars are about to crash into each other on a tight mountain pass (maybe a bug that couldn't for see the accident).

There are 3 possible outcomes:

      1. Car 1 and Car 2 crash into each other killing all passengers.
      2. Car 1 with 3 passengers drives of the cliff, car 2 with 1 passenger survives.
      3. Car 2 with 1 passenger drives of the the cliff, car 1 with 3 passengers survives.

The cars can communicate with each other. The logical resolution would be to drive the car with the least passengers off the cliff to save as many lives as mathematically possible.

I don't know how I would feel about my car killing me although logically I wouldn't have a chance of survival anyways.

<comment><USER28> What do you think happens in this situation currently with human drivers?

Are we holding machines to different standards than we hold each other?

<comment><USER29> Yes.

Not too long ago I had the opportunity to have a surgery performed by a robot controlled by a human surgeon. My wife was adamantly against it since there had been accidents previously with the robot other places in the world. Overall, the rate of incident was lower than the rate of incident for human surgeons, but to her that was not the important point.

There are people who will definitely hold machines to higher standards, and if they don't meet them, to them they are clearly inferior.

<comment><USER30> Surgical robots do not perform as well as traditional instruments.

I've talked to a few hospital executives and all have said that in most cases, these robots only cost them money and decrease the quality of the surgical procedures.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526934/Surge...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526934/Surgery- performed-robots-no-successful-using-humans-cost-LOT-more.html)

<comment><USER31> I know that disregarding evidence because of association is a fallacy, but can you come up with a better source? I have to strain my memory to think of an accurate article written by the newspaper you linked.

<comment><USER30> I agree, I was hesitant to even use that link, I believe the Wall Street Journal is generally considered more reputable:

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/robotic-surgery-brings-higher- co...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/robotic-surgery-brings-higher-costs-more- complications-study-shows-1412715786)

And another from a relatively reputable healthcare company/journal:

[http://www.healthline.com/health-news/is-da-vinci-robotic- su...](http://www.healthline.com/health-news/is-da-vinci-robotic-surgery- revolution-or-ripoff-021215#11)

<comment><USER31> Thanks! These are good articles.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: evaluating project ideas, how do you do it? - <AUTHOR>

I've read some articles in the past days about idea verification before diving into it. I think that nails the problem I have when building stuff - it looks like it might be useful for someone to pay for it, but I don't really know. I've given up on "build it and they will come" model because there's simply no time to execute false ideas while maintaining a full time job.
My last app is youtube -> mp3 converter, I've spent 3 weeks of midnight grinding building a python powered backend server on top of ffmpeg and another ~2 weeks building the frontend website. Launched in mid Jan it now has very few subscribers, adsense rev. was laughable so I took it off completely. Should I have known how hard it was to gain search engine rankings, how unwilling users are to pay for such service - doubt I'd do that again. But I did not verify it, I simply hoped there's still room in this space (well, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, who knows). How could have I verified it?
My next idea is to build a self hosted client, workflow, invoice and preview manager targeted at small digital service firms, such as countless psd2html companies so that they could install it, have a link on their website called "client area" where their customers could login, see progress, invoices, give feedback on shown work. Now this does seem useful to me as I've been into these type of services, but would anyone pay at least 50 bucks per year? To verify it, do I just create a wufoo form and approach target audience directly, promising some incentives for filled survey?
Appreciate any insights. <comment><USER2> Have you read "The Four Steps To The Epiphany?" If not, get it, read it, then read it again.

[http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven- Blank/dp/09...](http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven- Blank/dp/0976470705)

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then check out the series of videos that starts here:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5E38frHo1U>

Or read some of Steve's blog posts from here:

<http://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, did not know about the book. I'll be sure to check it out. The video though was more like an interest generator than anything concrete.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, the book goes into a LOT more detail. It's actually a detailed step-by- step roadmap for how to go from and hypothesis / guess, to a validated product idea with a defined, existing and profitable market. It's oriented mostly towards enterprise software scenarios, but he does point out where the same ideas can be applied to consumer products to some extent.

Honestly, if enterprise scenarios are on your roadmap at all, I think you may find it to be one of the most valuable books you'll ever read. I'm just now in the process of putting his process into action for my own startup, and I'm solidly convinced that this is The Way To Go (esp. for enterprise software, which happens to be what I'm doing.)</comment></comment></comment>


Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages - <AUTHOR> https://www.gremlin.com/blog/introducing-gremlin-free/ <comment><USER2> Ha, after working on building Uber's chaos monkey (which was hard and took a while to build) and working with Netflix's chaos monkey — it's super nice to see Gremlin release this service so anyone can see the benefits of chaos engineering. I hope they add a "random chaos" feature to keep engineers on their feet. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey folks, I work at Gremlin and we're super excited to announce this launch. Drop any questions, comments, or concerns, we're happy to help!

<comment><USER4> I like the look of this and love that you have released a free version. I am a little dismayed, though, that the two options are $0 and $1000/m (paid annually) with nothing in between. The free version seems great to get started, but I'd really like a lot more of the attacks that the paid version has, but $12,000 is much, much too high a price for a startup or personal project. That's quite a jump in cost.

<comment><USER5> I can't speak for this vendor in particular, but one common reason for pricing like this is the vendor doesn't want to deal with smaller customers as they often have the highest support requirements.

<comment><USER6> Pretty much. An enterprise customer won't bat an eye at $12K/year, and I imagine it'd pay for itself pretty quickly.

I can definitely relate with GP, though. It feels frustrating to learn about an interesting product only to find that it's priced way outside of your budget.

At least Gremlin has a public sticker price. Sometimes enterprise services just skip that completely and require you to setup a call with someone in their sales department, which usually means the service is outside of your budget.

<comment><USER5> > which usually means the service is outside of your budget.

I wonder if this is true though.

Maybe it puts off people who otherwise might be able to have a product tailored to their budget???

<comment><USER4> Its possible. I know a guy who isn't put off buy "call us" pricing notices and he seems to get good deals, so its certainly possible. Many of us will never find out though, because "call us" means "close tab". Even if I really want their product and am willing to pay a lot for it, my time is too precious to me to waste on calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Failure as a service doesn't make all that much sense considering that a many failure scenarios would make the target host inaccessible to Gremlin.

How does Gremlin handle this?

<comment><USER3> Good question! All of the network attacks have a whitelisting capability, to keep the host accessible. This isn't an issue with state attacks, as the client will come back online once the host reboots. And with resource attacks the client typically remains active, if your application is handling starved resources well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is anyone aware of a chaos tool that isn't a SaaS (free or not) and doesn't require using Spinnaker like the current Netflix chaos tool does?

<comment><USER3> Yes, we compiled a list of all the OSS alternatives to Chaos Monkey here!

[https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/chaos-monkey- alternativ...](https://www.gremlin.com/chaos-monkey/chaos-monkey- alternatives/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So here is what I don't get about this stuff.

What happens to the in-flight requests? Don't a few users run into random errors whenever a host is killed unexpectedly?

You could have your loadbalancer retry everything that fails, but then wouldn't every single request in your app have to be idempotent?

<comment><USER10> Server crashes happen. This forces you to deal with them instead of pretending they won't.

<comment><USER9> Well yes, but I would suggest that they are uncommon enough that a few requests failing isn't a problem when those happen.

It's an entirely different story when you are killing processes constantly.

<comment><USER11> If "a few requests failing isn't a problem" is a reasonable statement in your company then this type of service isn't really aimed at you. The point is to help shake out fault tolerance issues. If you can already tolerate faults there isn't much of an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do you prevent abuse of this tool?

<comment><USER3> Security is extremely important to us. Clients authenticate to our control plane either with a secret string or a certificate. Clients can be revoked at any point from our webapp and as well if the client loses communication to our control plane, any ongoing attack is halted.

Check out our security page for more: [https://gremlin.com/security](https://gremlin.com/security)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What infrastructure size does one need to have where this technique is beneficial? Genuinely curious where the threshold is.

<comment><USER14> Multiple criteria:

1\. When you go from one machine running the code to more than one 2\. Any system that may experience failures and detection of such failures and recovery is desirable 3\. Most distributed systems due to the failure scenarios inherent in such systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> NB: This company "Gremlin, Inc", its product "Gremlin Free", and its use of the Gremlin name is in no way affiliated with or related to Apache TinkerPop™ Gremlin, its ASF marks, name, the open-source Gremlin graph programming language, ASF TinkerPop Gremlin Graph Traversal Machine (GSM), associated libraries, or the Gremlin Graph developers group formed in 2009.

[http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/faq/](http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/faq/)

<comment><USER16> It's also probably not related to the 1984 movie "Gremlins" or the 1970's car of the same name (listed as one of the ugliest cars of all time[0])

[0] [https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/worlds-15-ugliest- cars/7/](https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/worlds-15-ugliest-cars/7/)

<comment><USER15> ASF marks were filed at formation. Identifying and distinguishing the use of similar and potentially confusing marks (esp in software products) is one of the required duties. The use of ASF marks in software products is prohibited to prevent confusion.

<comment><USER16> TinkerPop is a graph database. This is an infrastructure testing system. The likelihood of confusion between those two use cases is comparable to the likelihood of confusion with a movie or a car. You have a trademark, that's awesome. Even McDonalds trademark, which is one of the broadest, is scoped.

<comment><USER15> I was confused when I first saw the project, cartoon logo and "Gremlin _Free_ " name, and I'm intimately familiar with both the Apache TinkerPop Gremlin _open-source_ project, its third-party libraries, and the extensive ASF legal process we went through registering and identifying the use of marks.

Read up on your trademark, IP and copyright law. The use of similar marks is not permitted when there is potential for confusion, such as two different software projects, esp with overlapping audiences.

NB: TinkerPop is NOT a "graph database", it is a collection of software libraries for connecting to, using, and managing graph databases and distributed processing platforms. Gremlin is a primary part of that stack -- Gremlin proper is the programming language, and the Gremlin GTM is the runtime.

<comment><USER16> It doesn't sound like you were confused about whether they were the same project, it sounds like you were immediately concerned whether the other endeavor was in conflict with your trademark. That may constitute confusion but it's not the sort of confusion trademarks were designed to mitigate.

<comment><USER3> We did register the Gremlin trademark early on to be sure we had all of our bases covered:

[https://trademarks.justia.com/871/94/gremlin-87194877.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/871/94/gremlin-87194877.html)

<comment><USER15> So you begin by imitating Google's old logofont, and then you switch to something resembling Google's new logofont [1].

And for a company name, you decide to use the name of an established programming language and registered mark of a top-level Apache project [2], which has been in use since its inception over a decade ago, and incidentally it's a project and programming language that both your previous employers know well [3].

That's some inspired work, overflowing with creative originality. And to top if off, you have animated graphs floating in the background. Yeah, no possibility for confusion there. There's a name for that you know? Google it and see if you can find the word -- its definition has to do with siphoning goodwill. Who advised you on this and agreed these were wise choices and that this would be a good way to begin?

[1] [https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_log...](https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo_for_google_done_in_house.php)

[2] [https://tinkerpop.apache.org/](https://tinkerpop.apache.org/)

[3] [https://www.gremlin.com/team/](https://www.gremlin.com/team/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can You Ping Secure.2checkout.com? - <AUTHOR> I'm implementing the integration with 2checkout (online payments) and found out that I cannot access its URL, which is used for the integration, from several locations in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Could you please try to ping this? I really need this stats.. Their support cannot solve this issue for a few weeks.
My ping results:
$ ping secure.2checkout.com
PING sab84n7.x.incapdns.net (22.214.171.124): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
Request timeout for icmp_seq 3
Request timeout for icmp_seq 4
Request timeout for icmp_seq 5 <comment><USER2> Just because you cant ping something does not mean its down. They could disable ICMP replies, and you will get nothing.

[https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/secure.2checkout.com.html](https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/secure.2checkout.com.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yep, it's not down. It's just weird that from some locations this resource is not accessible..</comment></comment>


Looking for feedback on our new start-up - <AUTHOR> http://www.greybox.co

<comment><USER2> Thoughts: I dig it, but don't know why I should use this more than just testing it out.

Rating: Meh. I'll play around for a bit but probably won't stick around.

The good:

\- Homepage Design: Great. Reminds me of a Pinterest for content (not just pretty pictures)

\- UX: Great signup, almost madlibs-style

\- You don't make me confirm my email before actually signing in

\- you don't make me have to join before browsing/adding value

The fail:

\- Value proposition? The about page is fluff

\- Why the landing pages for each article? Are you trying to instapaper-style redress the content in a more readable form? Then why just a part of the article? Are you rewriting the content via NLP or seomthing? You never tell me that.

\- Community: Why the social network aspects? Do I need a social network to consume my news?

\- New articles. How do I add new articles? What if I want to bring in an article I found elsewhere? I'm sure you can do it, but the UX doesn't make this intuitive.

\- After signup: Great. I have no friends except the founders. No content. Don't see that there is anyone else using the service. I'm supposed to be munching content. But after logging in I don't see any. Take me to content consumption or the community!

\- Design Fail: The user control box in the top left is hanging over my article using Google Chrome.

All in all... What's the benefit to this versus one of a million other ways to consume content? The value isn't shown implicitly or explicitly. Not better designed than Flipboard. Not more configurable than Pulse. Not more content breadth than Reddit. Not more "grab and read at my convenience on any device" than Instapaper. So what do I use greybox for? Is it just another pretty face? All the product descriptions are fluffy and nondescript, which is a turnoff. The design is great. From the about page is seems like you guys use this specific CMS and wanted to show that you could make a news aggregator with it. Cheerio! But why would I use this every day?

Is this a serious "let's build a business" launch? Or is it a "look what I made, it shows what I can do with this CMS, but we don't intend to really drop everything and pursue this full time and think we'll actually build a business."

<comment><AUTHOR> Really dig the feedback. Appreciate it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Measuring Absolute and Relative Basis for Scientific Claims - <AUTHOR> Unable to find a standard measuring scientific claims and attempting to find such a measure or at least be able to express what such a standard might be. <comment><AUTHOR> In the past, the closest "universal" study/work that to me fit the topic was:

"Why most published research findings are false"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15602364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15602364)</comment>


Online commenting cliché: "You realize that X = Y, right?" - <AUTHOR>

Of late, I find this clichéd phrase "You realize that X = Y (or some non-obvious statement which might not even be correct), right?" appear in online comments a lot. I find it very toxic.
Example on HN:
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22you+realize%22+%22%2C+right%3F%22&start=0
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22you+do+realize%22+%22%2C+right%3F%22&start=0
"No, you presumptuous commenter, I don't realize that. If I did, I wouldn't have said it in the first place. You realize that, right? Why don't you just say X = Y and leave it at that?"
I know it's supposed to be clever, but the novelty has worn off and now it's just very annoying. <comment><USER2> It's not great, but if one just says 'X = Y' and leaves it at that, then that often leads to complaints that one is being dismissive and glib. Some people really dislike being told they're wrong, even when citations and supplementary material is supplied for the argument. 'You realize..' can be snarky, but often it's an attempt to soften the blow.

</comment><comment><USER3> You realize that repeating something clever wears off the novelty and ultimately becomes just very annoying?

</comment><comment><USER4> You realize that's because people can't help but be egostistical, right?

</comment><comment><USER5> You DO realise this is used IRL too?</comment>


Type Safety in Two Easy Lemmas - <AUTHOR> https://siek.blogspot.com/2020/07/type-safety-in-two-easy-lemmas.html <comment><USER2> With so many imported operators renamed with an added haček, it seems fair to call this type-Czeching.

I'll see myself out.</comment>


Show HN: IG MVP – "Find Your Instagram MVP" [weekend Project] - <AUTHOR> http://igmvp.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> This didn't work for me. I clicked on the part where I share my friends list (which is public anyways), and got a heroku 500 error.</comment>


Tesla N. American Reservation List Exhausted - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/video/2019/02/09/exclusive-tesla-reservation-list-exhaust <comment><AUTHOR> URL being difficult. Needs params to work.

Video: [https://www.reuters.com/video/2019/02/09/exclusive-tesla- res...](https://www.reuters.com/video/2019/02/09/exclusive-tesla-reservation- list-exhaust?videoId=512811699&videoChannel=5)

Short version: Tesla has finished satisfying their reservation list. The remaining people on the list want the original low-priced model ($35K), which Tesla doesn't want to sell.</comment>


Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home (w/ Video) - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2013-06-wi-fi-enable-gesture-recognition-entire.html <comment><AUTHOR> I mean this is freaking awesome!!

Just imagine how easily you can turn your car/home/classroom and more into a Smart Environment!

Hope more people get the news, this is worth sharing. Can't wait to find innovative applications of it.</comment>


Introducing Stack Overflow Documentation Beta - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/07/introducing-stack-overflow-documentation-beta/?cb=1 <comment><USER2> What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one.

As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one.

Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projects' documentation on search engines, pointing developers there. This can be problematic, for example, if a big release comes out and the SO documentation is behind.

The documentation for a lot of projects is really bad, I know, but I prefer a solution which doesn't disrupt the work of the mainteiners which writes good and extensive documentation.

<comment><USER3> There's one question I saw on Stack Overflow a while back that irritated me. If you copied and pasted the literal question directly into Google, the top hit was directly to the canonical documentation, where you could just scroll down to the clearly marked heading, and copy and paste the sample code and have it work straight away.

When I pointed this out, I was berated for not understanding that Stack Overflow is trying to _become_ the canonical source. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the top hit on Google no longer pointed at the official documentation. It pointed at that same Stack Overflow question, with a half-assed answer that only gave a fraction of the information the real documentation did.

I appreciate Stack Overflow for its strengths, but it's harmful too. Being able to go directly to the canonical source of information for a product and do your job without anybody spoon-feeding everything to you is a vital developer skill, and I'm seeing more and more people who won't bother to lift a finger unless somebody does half their work for them. This project seems like it will push the developer community much further down this path.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, that best answer is totally editable by any user to be more informative and/or link to the canonical source of information. There are few projects whose docs have such low contribution friction, for better or worse. And unlike project-specific documentation, it comes in one basic format and set of norms.

I also don't think there's a problem of spoonfeeding information to developers. If a developer at Company X tries to solve all their problems via StackOverflow questions, waiting for someone to come save them, I'd have to assume that this would manifest as them being blocked all the time. At that point, it's up to their lead to teach them and hold them accountable for exercising other ways of resolving their problems, including RTFM.

<comment><USER5> I was just idling in the Documentation chat channel and based on what I was seeing there, it appears links to sources are _discouraged_ on StackOverflow documentation. Presumably, they're aiming to eventually host new content that's better than what's already out there. I think it's a bit silly -- at least make a Sources section where folks can click to view links to existing docs!

<comment><USER6> Everyone knows that cool urls don't change, but the problem with links is that not all urls are cool urls. Links rot over time.

<comment><USER7> So the answer is to not use links at all?

<comment><USER8> Put the content AND the link, instead of just the link. This way, if the link changes the info will stay in SO.

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't that be a copyright violation?

<comment><USER10> Like in any other writing, a short quote is fine. If it's long, then you may have to summarize the content in your own words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the footnote of the post they wrote they considered naming it "SO _Examples_ ", but didn't. For me at least, using "SO _Docs_ " to name the site is actually much more confusing. As a result, for the whole post I thought it is a dynamic manual, with per-function docs and examples. Only after browsing to the actual site I slowly realized it's not a manual: it's rather _a "book" of examples_. A list of HOWTOs, speaking in a language of yesteryear. As far as I see, it's impossible to build a MSDN in it. I couldn't add full documentation for one of Go packages here — borders cross vague, overlapping concepts, not clearly cut packages. To make it clear: I don't want to deny that it can be useful — suppose as _examples_ for learning; but when looking for _docs_ , I like being able to browse them systematically.

So, two possibilities: either something revolutionary I didn't fully grasp yet — or _Examples_ , not _Documentation_.

For now, I much prefer the model of Go docs, MSDN, or PHP manual with user comments — if talking about _docs_.

<comment><USER11> _(replying to self)_ Ok, I see now one area where it actually seems to make much sense and looks like it can work very nicely: for stuff like _git_ , _vim_ / _emacs_ , _bash_ , etc. Generalizing, I'd say: for apps/services which happen to have _abysmal, irregular UX /API,_ which often accrued/emerged instead of being designed. A classical reference manual just doesn't work good enough for them, because the "natural" edges/borders in the API are too random and accidental. "SO Docs" as it is now can then organize the chaos, while making it easier to _categorize_ & _improve_ than a typical wiki.

[http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/git/topics](http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/git/topics)

[http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/vim/topics](http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/vim/topics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great idea I especially appreciate the fact that its done by example. A couple of things that bothered me are:

1\. The UI needs some refinement. I was looking to find a topic to post about and from my 10 minute browse I realised that if I was meant to find information in this documentation it's really hard to find what you are looking for. After you drill down to a tag it feels "unstructured". Readthedocs layout feels more user-friendly.

2\. To future proof the documentation examples should come with a version number they apply to. For example there is PayPal and DropBox API examples which in a few months might no longer be valid.

<comment><USER13> The UI needs some big improvements indeed. I toyed around with the site and although I could find my way around when just clicking through some topics, I am still confused as to what the structure of the site is (other than a list of topics, with a list of examples, not hierarchically structured or Q&A style or anything else that would make sense). I'm not sure I could find anything on here if I didn't get there via Google already.

<comment><USER14> personally, google is how I always end up on stack overflow, so I'd imagine the same will be true for this product.

<comment><USER13> 19 out of 20 times, true. However I totally get how SO is structured and contributing answers to people's question is something everyone gets. And if I want to find other questions (like for marking a duplicate, or researching a topic) I can use the search and tag system easily. Somehow the structure of this documentation area is not very clear to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is awful, another trick site that fools people into doing _work_ that they could be getting paid to do, all for the joy of getting some "karma." Well kids, karma ain't gonna pay the rent. If you want to get experience volunteering to write documentation for software, then find the existing official documentation and add to that (or start it, preferably in a repository close to the actual code).

Any profits that get made off this "documentation" (i.e. incoherent bag of examples) will not flow to the community or company behind the software in question. It's a parasite, leeching off the success of other projects which it neither created nor cares about.

How did they get corporate partners for their launch? That's easy. It looks to those companies like free labor.

<comment><USER16> The same could be said about the general idea behind Stackoverflow, except it's wrong. Sure, it's "free labour for internet points" but so is posting a project to Github and wanting stars.

You're forgetting that it genuinely helps other people in your industry. Stackoverflow is an amazing resource for programmers, pretty much every question I type into google relating to a library or some software comes up with 3 or 4 stack overflow links that _actually help me_. If they can take the masses of questions which basically form ad-hoc documentation for tonnes of projects and put them in a cohesive place then how is this a bad thing? Because people don't get paid $0.01 per post or something?

Perhaps any advertising revenue from the docs site could go towards something good, would this be better?

<comment><USER17> That last point is an excellent idea, I could live with that, knowing the project maintainers get ad revenue each time I look up my own examples and examples by others. This is great.

<comment><USER18> I'm guessing that will never happen in any meaningful way, if only because that's not as profitable as keeping everything they get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stack Overflow's point system is really annoying. I've been programming for around 10 years, but because I don't participate much I can't even comment on an answer.

A month or so ago I was stuck on a problem and thought I'd go through a tag for something I'm familiar with, and submit some answers to try and get enough points to be able to fully use the site.

One answer had a new programmer following a tutorial and using an old method signature. I commented that the tutorial he was following is out of date, and listed the correct method to use.

The person downvoted my answer, and then pasted (basically) the same code as the answer to his own question and accepted it. I know I just had bad luck in this case, but it's pretty frustrating.

Not allowing a user with low points to do some functions makes sense, but let them submit content and allow other users to determine if it's useful. I could have (and wanted to) comment on dozens of answers, which would of helped out a lot of people and saved them time/frustration.

<comment><USER20> Not being able to comment at low karma is a cause of low quality answers from new users. They post answers that should be comments, and get down voted to hell. I think account age should also factor into a few of the low karma thresholds like being able to comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If this gains traction I don't think we'll feel the benefits till a little later down the line.

I've contributed a little to the Swift tag but the real advantages come from technologies that don't already have good documentation.

I'm considering starting a tag for the enreco HTML -> PDF generator I use quite a lot as the official documentation isn't great.

<comment><USER22> > enreco HTML -> PDF generator

What is that? Googling it only brings up this comment thread.

<comment><USER23> Top result for me:

[http://www.nrecosite.com/pdf_generator_net.aspx](http://www.nrecosite.com/pdf_generator_net.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm actually very conflicted about Stack Overflow in general and of course the new documentation section as well.

For whatever reason I answer many (most?) of the WebGL questions. At some point I felt I needed to make longer form answers with better working examples so I made [http://webglfundamentals.org](http://webglfundamentals.org)

But, now there's this huge conflict. I spent a couple hundred hours on making webfundamentals.org but when someone asks a question on stack overflow I'm not supposed to just link to whatever I wrote. I instead I'm supposed to effectively transfer all my content to SO. Something about that just feels wrong. SO is making money from the content I created which feels a little weird (yes I know I get other people's content back). Also, while I get that SO's gamification is part of what has made it so successful it's also feels like it turns many things into a competition. I try to tell myself don't worry about those points I'd be lying if I said they didn't affect me at all in various ways.

Taking all that and adding to documentation, as an example, when I contribute to MDN I feel like I'm doing something purely positive. But if/when I contribute to SO Docs I already know I'm not going to feel the same. One reason is because SO Docs will be making money from my work. The only thing I get in exchange is some "score" on my name I can maybe use to get a job. Maybe that's a fair trade since I don't get a score on MDN?

I'm not sure how to make my point. I love that I find answers on SO but something just doesn't feel right and I don't know how to express it.

<comment><USER25> Links to what you wrote are welcome on SO and always have been, but link-only answers are not. Just summarise what you link to, and then recommend the link for the full answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is awesome. I can't count the number of times I've found an Android function that has almost no documentation. I usually post a question and answer on SO if I work out how it works.

I only wish it were organised a bit more like normal documentation - i.e. into classes and methods. Might make it easier to find things.

<comment><USER27> Have you considered/tried adding back to the official documentation in cases like these?

<comment><USER26> Yes and yes. They just ignored my contributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like the concept (reminds me of gobyexample.com) but this really isn't documentation. Instead of more code snippets I want high quality annotations (like snippets!) atop official documentation. If more people were driven to canonical docs but with a guiding hand I think we'd see more people actually understanding the code they write.

<comment><USER29> Like genius.com but for code documentation? :)

Edit:

Apparently they do it already: [http://genius.com/web- annotator](http://genius.com/web-annotator)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hope they release a private enterprise version, like they have for StackOverflow[0]. I'd love to host this on-prem to document my company's codebase.

Anyone know of a similar solution that's available now?

[0] [http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16054/is-the- stack-e...](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16054/is-the-stack- exchange-engine-available-for-use)

<comment><USER31> I would definitely be interested in this as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I understand this is (for now) for devs. I would love to see an equivalent (including private offering) for infra.

Getting people to document things on the infra side is deplorable in general and I would love to try anything that helps improve that.

<comment><USER33> "infra"? Quick google search did not illuminate me.

<comment><USER32> Infra as in infrastructure....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Cool new project – I think it might become very helpful one day. Documentation for a lot of open source projects is pretty bad and having to figure out a new contributing workflow every time just to hop in and help a bit is quite problematic. Hopefully, the unified interface SO users are used to will give docs writing a big boost.

That said, I still hope they output some sort of GitHub repo of all the accepted changes to make it a bit less walled-gardeny. A CC license is nice and all, but having the content in a repo as well would put my mind at ease.

<comment><USER35> The CC license used for stack overflow content is horrible. I have asked multiple lawyers what it means for cut-and-pasted code, and have yet to recieve a clear a definitive answer

\- is it viral when compiled into a binary, or when used in scripts?

\- how to attribute?

<comment><USER36> The license _for code_ changed earlier this year: [http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit- licen...](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-license- clarity-on-using-code-on-stack-overflow-and-stack-exchange) to MIT. It's not retroactive, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Really curious to see if this succeeds, fails like discourse or gets overrun by what I consider to be a major destructive faction of nitpicks and deletionists on SO.

<comment><USER38> Has Discourse failed?

<comment><USER37> Tell me about how it compares in usage to any of the solutions it set out to replace :-)

Or tell me about where people are using it to discuss every question that is not fit for SOs questions/answer format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I feel like this might be best used to document _unexpected_ behavior or _stupid_ things that maintainers may be too proud to acknowledge in their official manuals.

It should not be used to add redundancy. And it should not be used to accumulate cruft that doesn't belong in _any_ manual or list of examples. People have already gone for low-hanging fruit; for instance, do we really need examples of how to initialize a list?

</comment><comment><USER40> If anyone is wondering how this looks and is impatient to read the blog post, here's an example Documentation page for Java Streams - [http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/java/88/streams#t=201...](http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/java/88/streams#t=201607211226138669707)

<comment><USER41> Yep, examples with bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is cool.

It would be nice to have an API for this so that my IDE can pull these examples.

</comment><comment><USER43> Awesome! I've actually been working on a java IDE that allows uploading examples together with the results to a website: [http://jpad.io/example/1s/generating-random-int-array- within...](http://jpad.io/example/1s/generating-random-int-array-within-range)

The idea is to build up libraries of examples in different areas, allow easy code sharing and to remove some of the cruft needed. It's good to see stackoverflow hit this "code examples" area better.

</comment><comment><USER44> So this makes Stack Overflow a library of example code curated by people who already frequent their website. Am I reading that right?

<comment><USER34> I think this will be separate from Stack Overflow Q&A, if that's what you were aiming at. SO Q&A will still target specific examples. But yes, the new SO Documentation project will be code examples and explanations curated by presumably many existing SO users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I really hope that all open source documentation quality will increased by adopting such kind of tools. The fact that SO is used an informal documentation was a strong signal that there were much improvement to be done. I am just sad because I wanted to work on project like that :'(. Great job SO !

</comment><comment><USER46> This is super cool!

I am interning at Sourcegraph and we have heard devs want better usage examples too, so we automatically show all uses of any function

check out: -[https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/golang/go/-/info/GoPackag...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/golang/go/-/info/GoPackage/net/http/-/NewRequest) \- [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/golang/go/-/info/GoPackag...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/golang/go/-/info/GoPackage/encoding/json/-/Encoder)

</comment><comment><USER47> While this sounds like a good idea and will probably do well, it also centralizes more critical information and access to one for-profit company and product.

I really wish that we as a community would spend more effort towards better, decentralized systems.

</comment><comment><USER43> Awesome! I've actually been working on a java IDE that allows uploading examples together with the results to a website: [http://jpad.io/example/1s/generating-random-int-array- within...](http://jpad.io/example/1s/generating-random-int-array-within..).

The idea is to build up libraries of examples in different areas, allow easy code sharing and to remove some of the cruft needed. It's good to see stackoverflow hit this "code examples" area better.

</comment><comment><USER48> [META] This is popular, but is there a way to notify the mods of duplicates so that conversation doesn't get fragmented? I flagged [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12135897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12135897) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12136086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12136086) but I don't know if that's the right thing to have done?

<comment><USER49> linking to the more active discussion(!) and then flagging is the correct thing. If you do it before other comments have been added, this even flags the post as [dupe] automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Didn't see the word "test" in the article (except once talking about beta testing S.O.'s new product). And the word "test" isn't in these comments either, so...

Will updated examples be run through a program testing them in some way? If not a full run within a playground-style environment, then through a type checker?

And will the examples be tagged with version numbers? Some programming languages are notorious for changing syntax and/or semantics between minor versions.

</comment><comment><USER51> I really don't want people to start using something like this instead of improving the official documentation. I hate the fact it probably cannot be helped.

To "do the same thing for docs that we did for Q&A"? Yeah, except there just was no sane platform for Q&A before. And for docs there is, you know… the docs!

<comment><USER52> "The docs" are remarkably inconsistent between projects. "The docs" for C# really don't need any help, "the docs" (by which I mean the AFAIK unofficial cppreference.com) for C++ are fine. But even major languages like Python don't have the greatest documentation, never mind the thousands of libraries out there that have wildly disperate levels of official "docs".

<comment><USER51> Exactly, and this should be fixed individually per project. If this is open- sourced project, you can contribute to the docs. If not — well, if not protected by some license, there will be side-projects with documentation, or you can make your own. But there should never be competition between actual documentation and some fucking for-profit organization, exactly for this reason: the documentation often is bad, and this can, and should be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It would be nice if there is SO for business. Lots of companies have terrible internal documentation, Q/A tools.

<comment><USER54> Odoo Q&A is an open source clone of stackoverflow: [https://www.odoo.com/page/community- builder](https://www.odoo.com/page/community-builder)

It has three mode: forum, Q&A (clone of SO), share links (like HN)

<comment><USER53> Very cool. Would be great if three functionality can be supported: transient chat, persistent Q/A and persistent documentation. The same for Stack Overflow. They may make a big profit if business start to use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think a big problem is user motivation. On Q&A sites you get the reward to directly help someone and have a conversation. This is missing for documentation. I wonder if their gamification is enough to motivate people or whether they have to find a deeper human desire that they build into this and satisfy.

<comment><USER56> Besides karma, I wonder if users will be motivated by career opportunities? Contributing to documentation could be a good signal to recruiters that are looking for experts in a particular technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Anyone know if there are plans to roll this out to other stackexchanges? Would love to have this on askubuntu.com.

</comment><comment><USER58> Odd.

Couldn't find blog.stackoverflow.com The Q&A site blog.stackoverflow.com doesn't seem to exist…yet.

You can vote for it to be created through our democratic, community-driven process at area51.stackexchange.com, or see a complete directory of all our Q&A sites at stackexchange.com.

<comment><USER59> The blog was down for a bit and falling through to the generic Stack Exchange network handler, which is what you saw. It should be working now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> there's gotta be an integrated way to copy&paste examples (i.e. via autocompletion/snippet) from SO to our favorite code editor/IDE :D

</comment><comment><USER61> Can we use existing SO answers to curate documentation?

</comment><comment><USER62> looking forward for some standarized integration with github's wikis

</comment><comment><USER63> Will be interesting to see what the moderation guidelines will be like, and how zealously they are "interpreted".

</comment><comment><USER64> Will there be an example of a bad regular expression that could take down a website?</comment>


What happens when a language has no numbers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_cognitive_anumeracy_in_a_language_without_numbers.html

<comment><USER3> Anyone interested in the Pirahã should read 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel Everett ( [http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are- Snakes/dp/0307386...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are- Snakes/dp/0307386120) )

There's quite a bit about the language, but the backstory of Daniel going over as a missionary and losing his faith (and family) while trying to convert a happy people in no need of religion is stunning.

<comment><USER4> Everett gave a very interesting talk [1] to the Long Now org a few years ago in which he describes some of his experiences working with the Pirahã. Video is available at [2].

[1] [http://longnow.org/seminars/02009/mar/20/endangered- language...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02009/mar/20/endangered-languages- lost-knowledge-and-future/)

[2] [http://fora.tv/2009/03/20/Daniel_Everett_Endangered_Language...](http://fora.tv/2009/03/20/Daniel_Everett_Endangered_Languages_and_Lost_Knowledge)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> trivia: there are some languages out there which don't have different concepts for PIROS and VÖRÖS, and just bunch them together under a single color ("red" in english).

<comment><USER6> Red is a broad group of colours. There are plenty of more specific names for types of red, like scarlet or ruby, does that qualify?

<comment><USER7> I've seen somewhere a test for how many color words are there in the language - only color-words which do not correspond to a specific material or plant which color is emulated are accepted. So "red" or "blue" is fine, as is "piros" or "vörös" - but "sky blue" (color of sky), "ruby" (color of the gemstone) or "scarlet" (color of the Scarlet cloth) are not.

<comment><USER8> So orange wouldn't be counted as a colour in English? I'm not sure what value there is in measuring the amount of colour names in a language based purely on their etymology.

<comment><USER7> Orange wouldn't. By this logic, many oddities in color naming can be abstracted over languages, see for example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Univer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution)

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Does this hold true for every single language?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am surprised that no one has mentioned the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[0]. It's incredible, the effect that language can have on the mind. Given that they can communicate in whistles and hums, I'd also be interested in a study about their music as well.

[0][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

<comment><USER10> Everett argues in the other direction. He believes that the unusual aspects of their language stem from their unusual culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would a culture that has no trade need numbers? Approximate buckets are good enough for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

After all, it were Sumerian traders and bureaucrats who gave us both figures -and- numbers -and- a way to write them down.

<comment><USER11> "How many children/pigs/dogs are in the house? Did we forget any?"

<comment><USER12> Yeah, or alternatively how many wolves are approaching? It seems like it would be advantageous to be able to communicate whether 5 or 50.

<comment><USER13> What would you do differently if it was 5 or 8 wolves? Having concepts like "a few" and "a lot" seems to be enough for this case.

<comment><USER8> Decide whether to send one or two of your group of 8 hunters after each of the wolves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really don't know whether to believe this article. The whole setup sounds a little too ... perfect.

We have:

* a language where "speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations"

* a language that "contains no words at all for discrete numbers"

* a tribe too arrogant to learn any other language

There are stranger things in the world, but I'd take a long, hard look at the guy reporting these facts before I took them at face value

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's an interview with a Pirahã speaker:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHv3-U9VPAs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHv3-U9VPAs)

<comment><USER15> I don't see any (English) subtitles, do you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh Gawd...

Read: [http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/pesetsky/Nevin...](http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/pesetsky/Nevins_Pesetsky_Rodrigues_Piraha_Exceptionality_a_Reassessment.pdf)

Edit: and sure this is the Chomskians debunking the "upstart" Danial Everett but this is thorough, clear and convincing in contrast to the haphazard novelty that most Piraha discussion involves. A language with future? How...? Well, actually the answer would be just no, that's not how it works. And sure, this headline says "number" but all the discussions are interlinked.

<comment><USER17> I don't now. I read it. It seems that given that most of the documentation of the language was done by Everett, the Chomskians have some difficulty getting around some points.

I found the discussions of anumeracy in that PDF quite problematic because they basically argued we don't know enough about the language to say one way or another. Some of the difficulties, particularly adding vs removing spoons posed significant interpretation problems for me. Of course if I was differentiate between a few spoons and a bunch of spoons, the lines would be different if adding spoons vs subtracting them. This is because the relative frame of reference is different.

It seems to me that the problem is fraught with insurmountable epistemological problems which can't be solved and therefore people get to make best guesses. In general though I would trust the one who speaks the language more fluently than the one who doesn't. This isn't to address novelty claims. Bahasa Indonesia, for example, mostly lacks relative tenses as well, and Proto-Indo- European probably did as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use a language has no numbers every day (Bash).

<comment><USER19>
        for x in {0..3}; do echo $x; done

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can't help but to think abotu lambda calculus encoded numbers.

<comment><USER10> Nothing to do with the Piraha, I fear. Get some sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In science approximation is so common there's a required notation for experimental measurement for it. Perhaps they're just accept that sooner than us.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's not much different than most people rarely using Greek characters as formulas or constants.

<comment><USER23> Pretty different, actually -- the point is that they (supposedly) have no counting system at all. They lack the concept of numbers, not just the words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> ...they spark up conversation with the neighbouring tribe that has no concept of time!

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-13452711](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13452711)

...and then it all falls to pieces because they have no concept of god!

More to the point, what is the big deal with counting if there is no concept of private property?

<comment><USER8> I left the house with a somewhat largish amount of children. I've still got a somewhat largish amount of children, so I can't have left any of them behind.

<comment><USER25> I left the house with David, Susan, Steve, Kate, Alice, and George. I still have David, Susan, Steve, Kate, Alice, and George, so I can't have left any behind.

I've got issues with a lot of (Dan) Everett's work, but you don't need counting to handle that scenario.

<comment><USER8> You've now got to remember all of the kids' individual names (and hope that you haven't got a somewhat largish amount of John Smiths in your group), rather than remembering "I had 6. I've still got 6".

It's also even more of a challenge when the things you've got to remember aren't easily individually identified - a flock of sheep or apples or whatever.

<comment><USER19> It's not that hard to remember individuals' names, when there aren't all that many of them in your society to begin with, and you've known them all your life.

After all, you remember your parents' names, and your grandparents' names, and probably your uncle and aunts' names.

If you went on vacation with them, would you count your family members at the start and end of the plane ride, or would you just look around, and think, "Marina, Richard, Victor and Mila, Irina and Alex - okay, everyone's here!"

<comment><USER8> Actually I struggle pretty badly with names - I have honestly forgotten my wife's name in the past - so I'd probably still go for counting people even if they were in my own family. But I get your point.

What it doesn't address though, is my second point - things that don't have unique names. Remembering how many sheep you took out to the field, how many bowls you tooks with you to eat, how many pieces of wood you need to cut in order to fix up your wall etc.

Clearly they have managed to find a way to cope without needing these numbers, but I'm not sure that I buy the idea that they wouldn't regularly come across situations where having numbers would have made their lives simpler.

<comment><USER26> You may be "thinking backwards". If their language doesn't have this feature, or their society these concepts...it's __because __they don 't really run into these situations to the point that it becomes detrimental.

I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

My family bred dogs growing up so we always had a good number (~10) running around. When I let them out and in, I don't recall ever counting but rather ticking off names. Even then I don't think it was generally a conscious listing, but rather a scanning and the ability to "feel" that someone was missing.

For a very long time (well into adulthood) I had no concept of the proper order of the months. I could recognize month names, and with great difficulty name them all...but not their proper order. I had missed that section in school and it never really came up. When it did it really blew peoples minds for some reason. Eventually, I did come across it enough that I learned it.

I know nothing of the tribe in question but I don't think it's that much of a stretch that if they have things like a communal attitude towards property, few pieces of property they consider valuable, small flocks of livestock, etc... the issue may simply never come up.

<comment><USER8> > their language doesn't have this feature, or their society these > concepts...it's because they don't really run into these situations to the > point that it becomes detrimental.

Not necessarily. Just because something is detrimental, it doesn't mean that a society will automatically come up with a solution for it. It took people in the west millenia to come up with (or more accurately to be introduced to) zero - and the entire arabic numeral way of counting. That's not because it wouldn't have been useful before. It's simply that no one had figured out that this is a better way to count than their existing representations.

>I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

You may well be right - I'm no expert in Amazonian culture, so I don't whether they have flocks/herds/whatever of any particular animal. But that's just one possible example. I struggle to believe that they've not got some situations in their lives where numbers would be an advantage. Like I mentioned - <USER2> could be counting animals, counting the number of bits of rotten wood that might need to be replaced in their house, dividing a crop of fruits equally between the tribe, or something entirely different. But the lack of numbers in the language is no proof that there was no call for them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Higher wine prices boost drinking pleasure (people are sheep) - <AUTHOR> http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/01/higher-wine-pri.html <comment><USER2> Yes, people are sheep, but come on... there are always diminishing returns as price increases, but it's like any other sensory experience: just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean that others can't. That's like telling Mac users that they're wasting their money because "I can't tell the difference". Every niche has its own hackers and fanboys, winos included.

And I'd love to know which Toyota he feels is better than a Mercedes C-class, and I don't even like Mercedes...</comment>


Editing text is the opposite of handling exceptions - <AUTHOR> http://bosker.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/on-editing-text/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting application of category theory, I'd love to see a nonlinear editor with a good UI. Don't know if the general public would bite, but I think there could be a niche market there.

As an aside, thanks @ColinWright for another high quality submission. HN needs more of these kinds of articles.

<comment><USER3> Yes, more please! When plumbing gets uninteresting, it does my heart good to see there are still ideas like this I have yet to wrap my brain around. Besides HN and LtU, are there any venues that tend to attract it?

<comment><USER4> LtU?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lambda the Ultimate: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More accurate title: "Category theory is such a general concept that you can find something in pretty much any field that can be modelled with it".

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe that by "editing" he meant real-time "collaborative editing".

<comment><USER7> It looks to me like his scheme would remove the real-time requirement. With Google Docs you'll get unresolvable conflicts when one of the users is editing offline or from a slow network. Recording edits in the described way enables asynchronous conflict resolution, and changes don't have to be submitted in real-time for everyone to get the same document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No diagrams for exceptions? The diagrams for the text-editing are great, but of you claim that the exception-handling diagrams would look similar, you should draw them.

Or just rename the piece "category theory and text editing" and remove all mention of Exceptions. It would be a complete and good article without the misleading headline.

<comment><USER9> My understanding of the post is that the diagrams for exceptions are literally the same (not just close), only with the arrows reversed.

<comment><USER8> that's not possible, because the diagrams for editing text have editing- related words in them, and if you reversed the arrows you'd have nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If these are the kinds of problems that interest you, we're hiring at LiveLoop (<http://getliveloop.com>). We put real-time collaboration inside Microsoft Office, which is used by over 100 million people every day.

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of PhD work of Srinivas, using sheaves for KMP style pattern matching. It requires a bit of category theory but the core ideas are accessible. If you google "Sheaves KMP parsing" you can find it in ps format.</comment>